1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the machine translation of documents using resources such as dictionaries and rule data bases. The invention is further related to using different dictionaries and data bases for translating different parts of a document. The invention is still further related to creating the document to be translated using tags such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to indicate different sections of the document which are to use different translation resources.
2. Discussion of the Background
The concept of machine translation which translates a document from one human language to another has been widely studied. In the infancy of machine translation in the early 1940s, Warren Weaver of the Rockerfeller Foundation considered the concept of translation to be analogous to decoding in a manner using one-for-one substitution. However, it was soon realized that this was an overly simplistic analogy and that the subtleties of human language had to be taken into account in developing translation systems. For instance, the meaning of certain words in context has to be determined since specific phrases may have meanings that are not apparent from the individual words and some words have different meanings in different contexts.
One approach to improving the machine translation of a document is to impose restrictive rules on the words and phrases contained in the source document which is to be translated. In such a manner, one can obtain perfect translations but at the cost of radically restricting what an author can say. The basic idea of limiting the language which can be used in the source document which is to be translated is similar to the use of a translation phrase book often used by tourists which provides the user with a collection of "canned" phrases to use. This is fine, provided the canned text contains what the user wants to say. However, this is not convenient in many instances.